With the success of an application market place like the Apple AppStore™, it is anticipated that Operators and Handset manufacturer will come up with application market places of their own. Application market places—app store or app platform in short—provide an opportunity to reach users more directly than the more traditional approach consisting in populating an electronic device with a ready to use set of applications. However, the exponential growth of applications available on market places creates the problem of discovery of interesting applications for most users.
A user of an electronic device, such as a mobile phone or smart phone, may to rely upon rating systems to discover the popular applications in the market place. Alternatively, recommendation systems are available, for instance as taught in US2010250337, wherein different metrics are used to evaluate the needs of a user and a selection of applications, or apps in short, are presented to the user.
Whether using ratings or recommendation engines, a user will need a great amount of time to populate his electronic device, like his mobile phone or tablet, with applications he likes and uses frequently.
Operators are trying to anticipate the needs of new users by providing any new electronic device with pre-installed applications. Nevertheless these applications are based on the operator's view of all users' needs and are not customized per user. In other words, no matter who buys a new iPhone™ or Android™ phone, the same pre-installed apps will be available to the user when he first activates his electronic device.
There is still a need today to improve the recommendation of applications when a user purchases a new electronic device. There is a further need for a novel recommendation engine that allows personalization of the applications proposed to a user an activating a new device.